Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 05, 2012 @01:35PM
from the who-you-gonna-call? dept.

jenningsthecat writes "Public payphones seem headed the way of the dinosaur, as noted here on Slashdot 10 years ago, and again by the CBC earlier this year. Reasons typically cited for their demise are falling usage, (thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone), and rising maintenance costs. But during the recent disaster in NYC caused by Hurricane Sandy public payphones proved their worth, allowing people to stay in contact in spite of the widespread loss of both cellular service and the electricity required to charge mobile devices. In light of this news, at least one Canadian news outlet is questioning the wisdom of scrapping payphones. Should we in North America make sure that public pay phones will always be widely available? (After all, it's not as though they don't have additional value-added uses). And, should their continued existence be dependent on corporations whose primary duty is to their shareholders, rather than to the average citizen?"

It's time to both beef up the communications infrastructure to support reliable operation and to commit to helping your neighbors with access to things like a telephone, should you have one that works, during a major catastrophe.

The most reliable and robust communication systems are often the simplest.. In disaster zones, n-way radio is often the most reliable electronic communications. perhaps cellphones should have a p2p mode that kicks in when it can't get on the cellnet..

Or, to put it another way: If you were too cold hearted to subsidize the land line network by subscribing to it, and chose instead to save a few bucks, I'm too cold hearted to help you for free. Pay me the amount you saved on turning off your land line, and I'll let you use my phone.

Except that's not the way it works. The telcos want the wired land lines to go away because of the overhead. That means that they have policies that make it difficult, if not impossible, to keep your wired line.

This is a common problem: emergency and safety systems are completely pointless 99% of the time... until you have an emergency, at which point they're indispensable. It's like the bail-out bag in the closet with the first-aid kit and other necessities for an emergency: for years you wonder why you keep it because you never use it, until that day you didn't see coming when the fire department knocks on the door saying the fire's jumped the line and you've got 15 minutes before it gets here (which has happened here twice since I moved here, so not a theoretical example). Myself, I'd keep pay phones around as one of those necessary emergency expenses, the kind of thing you know you've needed in the past and will need in the future but that you won't have time to get deployed if you wait until you do need it.

Myself, I'd keep pay phones around as one of those necessary emergency expenses, the kind of thing you know you've needed in the past and will need in the future but that you won't have time to get deployed if you wait until you do need it.

Why pay phones then? There are lots of problems with the existing pay phone infrastructure - they are vandalized regularly, and tend to be used as a branch office for drug dealers. Seriously - here in Seattle they've removed pay phones from some locations because they were only being used by drug dealers.

If we really need such an item, then they shouldn't cost anything to use - otherwise it's government-sponsored profiteering during a disaster. Put them in accessible locations that are monitored, so we know

There's no reason to use payphones for that. How about a phone that only calls the police/ambulance/fire truck, ala what use to be on police boxes? Once my car broke down completely on a remote highway during a cross-country trip, in the middle of the night. Fortunately I had a cellphone, but I didn't know anyone anywhere near there, I didn't know how to find a tow truck, I didn't know anything. So I called 911 and they said a police car was already on the way. How they saw me there, I have no idea; I hadn't seen anyone else on the highway. But the police got there and then they looked at the situation, and called the appropriate people, and drove me to a motel. If you break down, but you are near Uncle Bob's house, if you can get to an "emergency phone," explain the situation and ask them to call Uncle Bob, they will call Uncle Bob for you. If Uncle Bob can't help and you're just calling to tell him you're okay, you didn't really need to do that. So obviously these emergency boxes would have to come with a campaign for appropriate use, but payphones needed that already (the payphone is not a urinal, etc.)

Not according to some of the conservatives I know, they say that the federal government shouldn't be involved in disaster relief. They also criticize Obama for not doing enough in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy.

Yes, I'd rather have my taxes going towards this than many other things. But I think frankly we don't need another tax for it. It's traditionally been handled as quid-pro-quo: "Telco, we're giving you cheap access to the public right-of-way to run your wires. Part of your side of the bargain is you're going to maintain these important services. If you don't want to maintain them, then let's talk about what the market price is for access rights for all your wiring...".

... If you don't want to maintain them, then let's talk about what the market price is for access rights for all your wiring...".

The problem is that the market price for access to the congresspeople is typically 10% of the market price of a resource that MegaCorp wants. In an ideal world, yes, MegaCorp would pay market rate for right-of-way or airwaves, then the government would use that payment to build infrastructure and services. Then they would allocate the money appropriately, according to need and value returned. (doesn't work that way in the real world, but we can dream)

That is the deal for land lines - 100% reliable in the face of... well, anything.

Cell service was never designed to be reliable. Cell towers do not have to stay running without power - most do not have generators and they have only minutes of time on a UPS.

The cable company provides "fone service" which is completely dissimilar from land line telephone service. There are few, if any, tariffs that exist to require such "fone service" to have any reliability at all. So when the lights go out, so does the

Instead of maintaining a system that is practically obsolete we should put the effort into making the newer system more robust.

How about building pico-cells into emergency vehicles with some sort of dedicated wireless backhaul? Figure out how to queue access to cell phones so that even if such a system can only handle 5-10 voice calls at once (due to backhaul bandwidth limits), anyone with a basic cell phone can virtually "wait in line" until it is their turn to talk.

It doesn't have to be limited to emergency vehicles, we could build stand-alone units too that could be battery powered and deployed fairly quickly.

In other words:Don't bother keeping what works working, instead we should spend obscene amounts of money and manpower on some new, theoretical system that may or may not work.

Uh no. Maybe you haven't noticed but payphones are going away because nobody is willing to spend an obscene amount of money maintaining them because nobody uses them. Meanwhile cell phone usage continues to increase. What i propose is to tweak the system that works 99% of the time so that it works 100% of the time.

Sure, we've already spent so much money to get the system working 99% of the time. Why not spend the 1% more that it would take to get it working 100% of the time? Heck, spend 2% more, and get it working 101% of the time! Sometimes, you don't even have to dial!

In other words:
Don't bother keeping what works working, instead we should spend obscene amounts of money and manpower on some new, theoretical system that may or may not work.

Uh no. Maybe you haven't noticed but payphones are going away because nobody is willing to spend an obscene amount of money maintaining them because nobody uses them.

I also contend that the reason payphones are going away isn't because people don't use them (they do), but rather that telcos can't nickel and dime the user with unilateral contracts and outrageous data charges.

Um, no. In a true emergency, everyone for themselves unless life or limb is in danger. Absent of that criteria the neighbors will not be allowed inside for any reason, which means they won't use my phone and I won't be using their phone.

Be prepared for an emergency or suffer, this includes those who foolishly only keep a cellphone and have no landline.

I'd laugh my ass off if your neighbor has something you need, say electric generator, fuel, <insert whatever it is that you might also have in which case they have MORE>, and you need their help, and they turn around and use your logic on you.

How about just keeping an old-fashioned telephone (the kind that doesn't need to be plugged into a power outlet) in your closet? If the pay phones are working, that phone will work too when plugged into your house's phone jack. If you don't have landline phone service but still have a landline phone jack, you can usually still make 911 and toll free calls.

You are so horribly naive. You cannot failure proof a system. The more complex it is, the more you cannot do it.

Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have missles now". and then vietnam proved them wrong.Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need candles anymore, we have electricity". And then every major storm proves them wrong.Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need LORAN we have GPS!". and then when a glitch interupts GPS for a few hours everyone freezes cause there is no backup.Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have the police to protect us", until one day the police are too slow.

Somethings stick around simply because you can't beat a classic. Sure, something shinier comes along, the old reliable gets put back in teh corner, gathering dust. But then when shiny breaks, as it always must, you still got Ol Reliable back in teh corner just waiting.

At somepoint we may get our cell system to where it is in the category of it simply just works, no maintenance needed, no matter what happens we'll just pop it out and bam it works (ya right). But technology is always advancing. By then there will likely be a new shiny. And once again someone will raise the cry "but its obsolete, get rid of it, we got teh neural net now, we dont need a backup. just engineer the nueral net to be failure proof".

Having a low-tech, old fashioned, "obsolete" backup is smart. You cannot prepare for everything. The more complex a system, the more ways it can fail. The KISS principle is an axiom for a reason. Overengineering exponentially adds to costs while giving exponentially less benefit in return. 100$ to get 95% there. 1000$ to get 98% thee. 10000$ to get 99% there. 100000$ to get 99.5% there. Etc etc.

Obsolete is not a bad word. Sure, payphones and landlines are "obsolete". but once your fancy high tech comm relays get taken out by SuperMegaStorm X, even after spending billions to overengineer it, you wont care how "obsolete" it is, unless it's to curse the morons who demanded it be removed.

Technology is great. But the higher the tech, the worse it is when it goes down without a backup. Having around old seldom used backups is a leg up, a boost, when the s*** hits the fans. Like a cheat sheet, lets you get back in the game quicker, back to normal faster.

How about focusing on SMS instead? (except may be for the blind, the elderly, or 911). First mandate that all SMS are free and are part of the price of any phone plan you get, so everyone gets used to texting (still allow parents to optionally block texts for their kids, so that the parents' lobby doesn't intervene).

Then focus on building an infrastructure that supports that kind of lighter-weight traffic. That would be a much easier intermediary goal I think. We have enough trouble keeping up with phone tr

Maybe portable cell towers (with recharging docks for the phones?) would be better. Or for that matter, a kiosk where a Red Cross worker lets people use a satellite phone for 3 minutes per turn. The problem with fixed emergency infrastructure like phone boxes is they may get wiped out, and they're sitting unused almost always.

Yes, although satellites are slow and expensive. Portable cells towers built into trucks with their own generators and a high speed mesh network would be better. They would expand out from the nearest working high speed internet connection and expand into the disaster zone.

A military hummer can cross some really rough ground, but yes, clearing the roads is an important part of cleaning up after a disaster. For port cities, a ship based version of the same thing would be useful.

Okay, your cell phone phone is dead. Zombies have taken out the cell towers. It's an urban apocalypse. You're surrounded by evil, and low on gas. And there are no pay phones. How do you get in touch with the mad scientist 500 miles away to get the cure?

It's easy guys: Walk into a commercial building with power and ask to use the phone. In fact, many without power will still have a few POTS lines powered (read: Not digital); but you may have to hunt for them, so if you're trapped in an apparently "dead" building with zombies and cthulu beasts outside, patience and a flashlight will save the day. Just avoid the restrooms.

I know I'm being sarcastic here, but seriously guys -- if you're ever in a true emergency situation, stop and think. House flooded? No fresh water? Think about where fresh water might be -- stop panic'ing and really think. Ding! Toilet reservoir. People get all manner of stupid in a crisis because something they used to depend on suddenly isn't there. Guys, you've got millions of years of evolution that has taught you to be adaptable.. but not a lick of those years is going to do you any good until you calm down.

We don't need pay phones. We need to teach people to be self-reliant, instead of hiding under their desks. The government and emergency services may not always be there for you. Neither will any of your modern conveniences. But there is nothing you need to survive that can't be found within a few miles of wherever you are in an urban environment. Food. Shelter. Water. Medical supplies. And if someone's injured, know first aid! It's not rocket science; Take a course today. And keep a small bug-out bag in your car. Less than $100 and some planning ahead of time and you can not only survive just about any catastrophe but also help the people around you.

Everyone should be doing this. Don't rely on your fucking cell phone, or having access to any phone at all. Don't rely on the government. Rely on you. In an emergency, that's the only person you can rely on.

Your points are good ones. "Don't Panic." Use your brain. And before emergencies strike, follow the scout motto: Be Prepared. Don't count on anyone from "the government" showing up to bail you out in the short-term.

The real question, though, is whether pay phones are something that should be a public service (vs. a market-supported service). Should we pay for pay phones as a "just in case" backup plan for those who may need it because they weren't prepared or couldn't help but panic?

Sand states only. In the midwest, eh, its just another major blizzard, nothing we can't handle about twice a winter.

Three weeks isn't even all that much food. I probably have that much just in the chest freezer. No point buying burger meat for $5/lb when I can buy 10 pounds at $2/lb when its on sale, etc. No point buying 1 pound of white rice for $5 when I can buy 25 pounds for like $10 and being white rice it lasts forever.

... No point buying 1 pound of white rice for $5 when I can buy 25 pounds for like $10 and being white rice it lasts forever.

B.t.w. Dry goods, well sealed against moisture, also last in the freezer, so if you like whole wheat, or whole brown rice, you can keep it for years below zero, vs. 6 months or so on the shelf. If you temporarily need the freezer space, your well sealed dry goods can be taken out and re-frozen a few days later w/o effecting them too much.

C'mon people, get rid of the regulated payphones now, and during the next disaster, Free Market PayPhones (tm) will just pop up everywhere like daisies. (Of course it'll be $100 per minute call, but hey, that's what the Free Market is for)

Seriously, the National Guard should have a bunch of communications trucks that can form a mesh network after an event like this. They should be able to connect to regular cell phones, prioritizing 911 calls, then allowing some WiFi traffic to move out of a disaster z

I'm re-posting from the older thread linked above about NY's plans to use payphones as WiFi hotspots:

On a related note, have you ever wondered what that Police Public Call Box thing is that The Doctor uses to travel through space and time? I used to wonder too. It wasn't until I went to Edinburgh that I saw them and other objects that looked like them. I remember jumping out of my seat and saying "There's a Tardis!"

Well apparently they had a phone accessible from the outside that the public could use to call the cops in an emergency. Cops would have access to the inside where they could go in and hang their hat, hold a prisoner while help came, and effectively use it as a mini police station. Some of them remain and have been re-purposed for other uses like coffee shops or news stands. There were a lot of designs and didn't seem to standardize like the classic red phone box did.

Cities like Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool have updated the concept with "help points", little computerized kiosks that are under CCTV surveillance and have a direct line to the police. It'd be cool if they could introduce the modern functionality but contain it in the form of the old 1929 Mackenzie Trench design that was popularized by Doctor Who.

The moral of the story is that once infrastructure is taken out it's very hard to put back in. If you leave it in place, even when it stops being immediately useful, it can find a use later when some new trend (coffee shops) or new technology makes it useful again. When the old Police Boxes were going out of service, the WWW was a long way off and nobody could have foreseen their reincarnation as help point

Cell phones are great, but having a payphone option definitely comes in handy. I was at a large public event (a St Patrick's Day thing) a while back and had had a bit too much to drink and got separated from the group I was with. Had no idea where I was at and for some reason (I'm guessing just tower overload) my cell phone wasn't working. I kept trying to dial out for another hour or so but the battery eventually died. It was around 3am in the morning and virtually everything was closed.

Just add an easement to your city's antenna tower permits that will allow people to put in ham radio repeaters with autopatches.

Individuals will pay for their own transceivers for free (as they have for about a century) and hams will move traffic that can be done simplex to other frequencies.

There are a dozen repeaters in reach of my commute to work. There are naturally in places that don't flood and hams generally have great battery backups connected to them. Further, they don't require the phone systems

The payphone thing is part of a much larger problem. Forty years ago, the entire U.S,. phone system (except for a few independent pockets) was owned by a single company. That company did a pretty good job of maintaining a robust, disaster-resistant communication infrastructure. But it also stifled competition and innovation.

In the deregulation-happy 80s, we got rid of that official monopoly. This has had many positive results (hard to imagine the modern Internet being built in such a restrictive environment

If you had a working cellphone, you could instead have a microcell and emergency powerable charging ports. No need to for infrastructure to support collecting cash and able to be used by more than one person at a time and easy to armor against casual vandalism.

For emergency charging of your cellphone something like this [ebay.com] is useful. I normally use it for camping but I took it out last weekend and made sure the battery was powered up so we would have lights and cellphone charging in case of a power outage. The best part is even during the storm on Tuesday it was still able to charge the battery, amorphous panels don't need that much light to keep a cellphone charged.

Problems are:As we've seen with Sandy, the result is Cellphone coverage can get borked. Downed towers, cut communications, etc. AT&T was having mad problems in the aftermath, and I heard Verizon was having some too.

To ensure that a cellphone sitting in the vending machine for months or 1+years will still have a charge when you finally get it. If there's no power, then a dead cellphone is a waste.

Cellphones need to be activated before you can use them, even if it is just over another phone. Mass acti

New York decided long long ago to bury all utility lines, and this is why the pay phones continued to work. Most areas in this country have overhead utilities, so in the case of a hurricane the phone lines would fail.

I can recite exactly two phone numbers from memory: mine, and my Dad's. The latter is because he still has the same phone number I grew up with. So if I didn't have my cell phone, and power was out everywhere, I wouldn't know whom to call anyway.

So New York is flooded, power is out, and you can drop quarter into a payphone to call someone that cares?

I think this speaks more of the fact we need better power and wireless systems. How can landline service survive when everything else is knocked out? How about getting the people that invented landline phone service to invest a little time and effort making power lines and wireless services a little more resilient.

Also, I think its time that people invent a cell phone that can last more than a day on

Not necessarily. The Panasonic system [amazon.com] I have uses power from the handsets to power the base station in the event of a power outage. The system has 5 handsets, each of which will provide about 2-3 hours of talk time to the system. That should cover you for emergency calls during most power outages (and even some non-emergency ones).

Which is a great idea, but you can pick up a $10 corded phone and stick it in a closet somewhere as an even more reliable solution. I bought one for the kitchen, just to avoid removing and refinishing the wall jack that was there when we bought the house:)

The problem is, as some companies get you onto their 3-for-1 deals (TV+Internet+Phone) you often get some version of VOIP or something. Like Verizon pushes people that get their FIOS service to get their voice over fiber service, which means you are no longer using the old copper lines outside your house. So when your Verizon-box's battery dies after 8 hours... no phone for you. I think Comcast and the like offer their own types of stuff over their Coax lines.

That's not necessarily true. Just because VoIP is a kludge compared to TDM or cell switched services, does not mean that the backbone equipment to do it will not be protected by the same backup systems as TDM or cell switches.

However, the tendency not to use POTS copper on new installs would mean that new payphone rollouts would likely not be as protected, not being powered by the POTS lines but rather by a site-local power source, which could even be just grid. So what you say may happen for newer last mile setups, but existing POTS lines would likely be tied to a reliable backbone, VoIP or not.

That's not necessarily true. Just because VoIP is a kludge compared to TDM or cell switched services, does not mean that the backbone equipment to do it will not be protected by the same backup systems as TDM or cell switches.

However, the tendency not to use POTS copper on new installs would mean that new payphone rollouts would likely not be as protected, not being powered by the POTS lines but rather by a site-local power source, which could even be just grid. So what you say may happen for newer last mile setups, but existing POTS lines would likely be tied to a reliable backbone, VoIP or not.

Actually there is more truth to it than you think. In my territory, once a land line is converted to a VOIP based service the local telco will no longer provide POTS to that household. You can cancel the voip, or re order voip service but you are not eligible to purchase POTS service any longer. At least that's how they explained it to me when I upgraded to voip.On the upside, the features like call block that used to be available on POTS are once again available on digital. Pity it's just a marketing p

I believe the justification they gave was they replaced the line to the house with fiber, and would no longer be maintaining the old copper line required for standard POTS.

Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable. At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.

Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other pr

Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable.

It's usually not justifiable to remove the copper at all. NYC has dead copper in the same conduits as the fiber, some dating back to the 1800's [with paper insulation]. With the price of copper these days, that may change in the future.

At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.

It may not go all the way to the CO but only to the local pedestal [where fiber-to-the-curb becomes copper].

Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other providers who aren't pseudo-monopolies and don't need to pull your old copper lines?

In CA, sonic.net [not shilling] is running fiber-to-the-home in some municipalities. They are [probably] just adding fiber in parallel because the copper is actually owned by AT&T.

Actually, copper ownership is a bit murky. IIRC, when AT&T wired much of America in the late 1950's, it did so under a consent degree, paid for with U.S. tax dollars, so the copper could be considered a publicly owned resource.

This is actually pretty typical after most disasters. SMS is the most reliable way to get messages back and forth. It can be a high-latency channel for communication, but the message eventually gets delivered. By contrast, a voice call requires a continuous channel that is hard to maintain when everybody is trying to place calls.

None of which helps if the cell tower isn't there anymore or has no power, of course, but with the cell tower density in most places, that's probably not a huge concern unless yo

On the other hand, for real emergencies 911 works even on a "dead" twisted-pair line.

If there is no battery on your "twisted pair line", then there is no way for the phone to signal to the CO that it needs dial tone, and the reason for no battery is most likely because your pair has been disconnected from the CO altogether. Most likely, the pair out of the CO that goes to your local distribution box has been put in use for someone else.

I'd like to know how you think you can make any calls on such a line, much less 911 in an emergency.

What about keeping them but enhancing their usability? For instance, combine them with other forms of information services - city info, etc. Or perhaps some corporate partnerships like movie rentals. The phone part would be separate to keep that available if someone else was searching for the latest Star Wars flick...

I would use pay phones but for two things: 1) They require coins which I often don't have, and 2) they generally either refuse to take my coins or take them and then don't let me call. So the top usability improvement that I would like to see is for them to accept payment using a prepaid card like in many European countries.

That's all fine and good, but why not just provide a tower with a bunch of powered USB ports for people to stand around and plug into. It can be solar powered with a battery for backup. No power ties would be needed and no hardline. If you really wanted to wire it up, put a few low power cell phone antennas/radios on the top that could easily be replaced when new technology permits. This way you solve the existing infrastructure problem of having tens of thousands of people jamming regular cell towers and give people a place to charge up in emergencies.

The thing is... people have their own displays they carry around with them now. If you wanted to provide a local service to them you'd best serve them by allowing wifi connections and directing them to a web page with that info.

Yes. I was in NY for the hurricane and a public charging station would have been WAY more useful than a phone booth. Also, the cable and cell companies could have gotten a lot of good PR by opening up their wifi hotspots. Starbucks did a lot if business (as in packed wall to wall, sitting on the floor or standing) by having free wifi and power outlets they didn't mind people using.

I've always been slightly curious as to how difficult it would actually be to equip all cellphones with the chips and antenna necessary to communicate with something like the Iridium satellite network.

Barring something truly apocalyptic, it's not like the satellites are going to go down.

If payphones are gone then how could someone make anonymous, untraceable calls (if need be)?

Long ago, society forgot that there could ever be a need for such a thing. Ironically, the same police forces that ask for anonymous tips about criminal activity also attacked anonymity systems, claiming that they would only be used by criminals.

If the disaster is big enough then there will likely be a police officers or paramedics on every block anyway, which is what you'd want the phones to be used for anyway.

1. It is unlikely there are enough emergency service workers of any kind to stock "every block" with their own, no matter how large or small the disaster is.

2. If there IS a cop or EMT on the block already, he's most likely there on a call already and cannot just drop what he's doing to come deal with you.

3. You MAY be lucky enough to have enough neighbors who are CERT trained and, more importantly, actually useful for something (CERT training doesn't make people useful during emergencies, it just makes